Category Archives: 2012 Election

2012 Election, Economy, Media, Organized Labor, Politics

‘American Jobs Act’ Is Just That, An Act

Pass this bill right away. Now! Without delay! That’s what our President has been saying ever since he held up and waved his 155 199 page stimulus bill for the cameras. A stimulus bill that he calls the American Jobs Act.

From all the admonishing of Republicans (btw, some Democrats don’t like it either) he is doing to pass this bill quickly, one would think that he actually gave it to the House to be recorded so that it could be worked on. Fact is, no Democrat in the House of Representatives has presented the bill for consideration. So in fact, as of today, there is no American Jobs Act as proposed by President Obama.  Not to be confused with H.R.2911 American Jobs Act, which was introduced Sept. 14, 2011.

All we have is the President going on tour like a snake oil salesman asking the American people to ask their representatives to pass the bill. Will someone please inform the President that until it is delivered and recorded in the House, there is no bill? Forget the media. They haven’t noticed either.

Last month when he was on vacation, the President announced that when he got back to ‘work’ he would present his plan to create jobs. It was his top priority. Now we see that it is so low on anyones list of priorities (or so bad) that no one wants to deliver it. Everyone now knows that there is nothing new in what he has proposed. Just more of the same; mostly pumping your money into public sector labor union-type jobs and pensions.

If creating jobs is so urgent, what the president needs to do in front of a TV camera is to admonish some Democrat for not submitting it. Presuming of course that the President isn’t still sitting on it himself, like he is doing with those trade agreements he brings up in almost every news conference on jobs and the economy.

If it were introduced as a bill today, this is what it would look like:

[scribd id=65441495 key=key-1b73r5xin0y19umx7kmx mode=list]

2012 Election, Economy, Politics, Race Relations

Obama Did Not Fail, He Succeeded

As an example of just how divisive and mean-spirited the political Left is, Democrats in Washington included, if you oppose Obama’s agenda to remake America into something like Europe is trying to get away from, then you must be a ‘racist.’

Three years later, with ample evidence that Obama is making America worse; no economic recovery, national debt so high as to equal generational theft, no job growth, ‘adjusted’ unemployment over 9 percent, real unemployment double that, and black youth unemployment over 50 percent in urban areas like Washington, D.C., and if you still support him, doesn’t that make you a ‘racist?’

Oh yeah, give me more of this.

 

2008 Election, 2012 Election, Economy, Florida, Organized Labor, Politics, Race Relations

A Time For Choosing

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Since we were never given the choice in the last presidential election, the next election will be the time to choose. The 2008 election culminated in eight years of bashing Bush, and Bush not responding once. Americans were offered only hope and change. And who is against hope, and who is against change that makes things better? ‘Better’ being the operative word.

Obama never said, elect me and I’m going to nationalize health care and interfere with free-market economics by declaring some industries and businesses as ‘too big to fail,’ and borrow and spend trillions of dollars, not to stimulate the economy, but to ‘save’ union jobs in the public sector and the auto industry. He never said elect me and I’ll make it the responsibility of government to increase labor union membership.

Did we elect a President to put America on the fast track to Socialism? Do you think he would have beat Hillary Clinton in the primaries if he ran on what he is doing to this country today?

But now there is a choice. And it is no better illustrated than in Florida’s new law to drug-test welfare recipients and certain state employees in order to enforce a drug-free workplace. Progressives argue that Gov. Scott was trying to save money on the backs of the poor.

I don’t think it’s a matter of fiscal conservatism. Whether conservative or liberal, broke is broke. Just because someone is using drugs is no justification for spending more than we have. And it’s not that Scott, or Republicans, don’t care about poor people. They care about people who are on drugs and getting public monies.

The disintegration of the family among many poor people is a good reason to make bad choices. And it is welfare programs that tend to replace the father, or mother, and create this welfare class that is evermore dependent on the government. What Gov. Scott is doing is a move in the right direction. A move in the direction of teaching people some personal responsibility. Get off the drugs and you can continue to receive help.

This bill brings out the differences between the political Left and Right. One endeavors to fix the problem by attempting to fix the person. In this case, to provide an incentive to kick the habit and become self-sufficient again. The other seems content to be the giver of money, with no reason or motivation to quit a bad habit, which also tends to garner a strong voting block of welfare recipients.  In this context, it is Republican policies that try to heal and raise the poor by making them independent, if not just less dependent on government. It’s the old, “Give a man a fish and he won’t starve for a day. Teach a man how to fish and he won’t starve for his entire life” thing. It is Democratic policies that tend to keep the poor right where they are, dependent on the government for their livelihood, meager as it might be. The uneducated will easily identify with the person who gives them what they want instead of the one that wants them to earn what they want on their own. It’s about trying to teach people how to get off of welfare instead of trying to find out how we can find money to subsidize destructive behavior. Healing the person or family is better, more compassionate, than keeping them where they are. The bill isn’t about hating poor people.

Let’s look at the results of a landmark Democratic program. Nearly half of the country is getting some sort of government assistance. Does it look like the war on poverty (that began 50 years ago) has worked? There are drug rehabilitation programs out there, some at no cost. Individual responsibility means taking advantage of it and choosing to use what would be their drug money toward their own rehabilitation. How else does one teach personal responsibility if they have to do nothing on their own to make a change? They can get their welfare, if they choose to get off drugs first.

Democratic programs do nothing to reduce the number of poor people. What they have done is grow government and make poor people more dependent on government, and on the Democrat party. That is the result, whether intended or not.

There will always be people at the bottom of the ladder. The bottom of the ladder for U.S. citizens is half-way up the ladder compared to other countries. Democrat’s policies tend to make that ladder horizontal, destroying the notion of the individual.

Similarly, you will hear Democrats complain about the so-called income gap. They think it is evil that some people can make and accumulate wealth while some don’t.  I wouldn’t be so concerned about a gap between the rich and poor. I’d be concerned to make sure that the poor have every chance, the same chance, to get rich on their own.

Republicans have a HUGE up-hill battle to get people to understand that their policies are geared toward people helping themselves instead of relying on the government as their caretaker. Encouraging personal responsibility is so easily demagogued as Republicans hating the poor. And Democrats never miss the opportunity to do just that.

The immoral aspect of the Democratic social vision is that they put their faith in the government instead of the individual, which conditions poor people to look to them for sustenance. The fact that it builds strong voting blocks is no coincidence.

I’d like to see no minimum wage and no capital gains taxes. Since that has never been the case in my lifetime, one can only wonder how much better off ‘the poor’ would be. Again, it highlights the difference between the competing philosophies. Big government and control of economic conditions, or less government involvement and allowing free-market economic principles to work.

You don’t have to look far to see the difference. The free-market capitalism camp made us the greatest country in the world in under 200 years. The rest of the world is in the other camp and has nothing but shared misery to show for it.

2012 Election, Economy, Media, Politics, Race Relations

Listening Tour, It’s Like Voting Present

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President Obama speaks at a town hall-style meeting Monday at Lower Hannah's Bend Park in Cannon Falls, Minnesota

Update 8/19/2011: President Obama hits the campaign trail today in his two new multi-million dollar busses we bought him. The White House “explanation” is that they are on official business, not a political campaign.

Curious thing about President Obama’s campaign kick-off. If his first day on the campaign trail isn’t important enough to cover live, it begs the question “why is that? Ordinarily, the President is on every major TV network and most of cable. Could it be because he is not drawing crowds? Maybe it is because visiting states and localities where unemployment is low, and predominately white, would not set well with the  Congressional Black Caucus? Or both.

The big news of Obama’s new re-election campaign that is not being reported is that he is out of ideas. Not only is he out of ideas, but he is not taking any responsibility for the malaise we are seeing today in this, Jimmy Carter’s “second term.” Instead, he is pointing fingers at Republicans, Congress, the tsunami in Japan, and the so-called ‘Arab Spring.’ The latter of which, you may recall, President Obama tried to claim credit for when Egypt overthrew President Mubarak.

Two and a half years into his administration, the “leader” of the free world does not have a plan for economic recovery that works and said that “there are a lot of good ideas out there and we’re going to listen to them” because he wants to “create jobs.” He must think the Cut, Cap, and Balance bill passed by the House was not a good idea.

What a disappointment President Obama must be to the people who believed he could deliver on his community organizer-style campaign rhetoric. He is voting present with each committee he forms. Nothing has changed where Obama is concerned. Well, except for our longest stretch of a stagnate economy, unemployment is up, no net increase in private sector jobs so far. And did you know that youth unemployment in Washington, D.C. is now over 50 percent? That’s up from 25 percent a few years ago. In fact, minority unemployment everywhere is as bad as it has ever been under President Obama. Sure, I’ll vote for more of that! What?

2012 Election, Economy, Politics, Race Relations

Obama’s Historic Presidency

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Yes historic. And I’m not talking about his race. Everyone got over that the day after the election. (well, except for liberals/progressives) What else is historic for President Obama is that he now has the bragging rights for overseeing the country’s fall into decline while in office.

  • the return of double-dip recession fears
  • an emboldened Tea Party
  • a sinking Dow
  • stagnating employment
  • and the nation’s credit rating downgraded for the first time in 70 years.

That would be the AAA credit rating that President Obama inherited from President Bush. A dubious honor for sure. What makes it worse is that not only was this train wreck of an economy predicted, it was preventable too!

The Obama administration says they’ve done all that can be done to fix the economy. They want to borrow and spend even more money, ostensibly believing that what didn’t work the last time, and the time before that, will work this time. Obama says we just have to sit tight and wait for the economy to improve. Recovering from the worst economy since the Great Depression is a “slow process,” the president said. What he really means is he has done all that he and his advisers know to do. It is not all that can be done.

There was a solution passed by the Republican-led House and tabled by the Democrat-led Senate called Cut, Cap, and Balance. By the way, Standard & Poor’s said that ‘Cut, Cap, and Balance’ was the only plan proposed by either party that would have preserved the AAA credit rating. So no one has the right to act outraged at S&P’s downgrade action. But for political reasons, not economic ones, the President has to pretend like there is nothing else that can be done. Just take it. Eat your peas. Get used to high unemployment, rising interest rates, rising costs everywhere, and a stagnant economy. That’s the change Obama has in mind. Don’t you wish you knew that a couple of years ago, before the election?

Link: Facing Economic Headwinds, Obama Struggles Again to Find an August Storyline

2012 Election, Economy, Media, Politics

Obamanomics Is Expanding

Updated 8/7/2011. Now that all the stimulus money has played its course, look around for signs of success. And also look for President Obama to ask for either another “stimulus” package or a QE3, or both. But that’s beside the point.

The point is the economic genius of our president, media malpractice, and how well the two go together.

Obamanomics began from a “social justice” footing. Simply put, social justice is a statist belief that the government must manage society in a way that guarantees outcome under the pretense of fairness.  I don’t believe that is in the Constitution, but Obama doesn’t preserve, protect, or defend it anyway. He really wants to be America’s new founding father.

He manages society through taxation, taking money from those who have it (regardless of whether they have been born) and give it to those who want it. The fact that the recipients might want to keep the checks coming by voting to keep them in office is just an unintended? consequence.

While Americans that have lost their jobs are in the unemployment line, President Obama is working hard to keep his own. Having been to 37 fundraisers up to this point in time, it is clear where his focus is. Bush and Clinton had 10 and 7 respectively for the same length of time in their first term.

But now, Obamanomics has a new twist. The fact that there is no job creation going on is not because of the president’s policies or his class warfare, wealth envy, or anti-business tendencies. PBS and Obama blame it on businesses for not hiring people. Here is a quote from a short PBS article that took two people to write.

However, it’s been clear for months that President Obama’s ability to enact job-creating policies has been significantly restricted by politics and the business community’s refusal to hire in the face of depressed consumer demand.

Restricted by politics? Not hardly. Obama got all the stimulus and major policies he asked for. Neither PBS nor President Obama and his advisers understand free-market economics. Businesses don’t hire people so that someone will have a job. They hire people when they believe they would lose business if they did not hire. They hire people so that they can make money. Or to put it another way, businesses don’t hire people when business is down and there is no prospect of business getting better any time soon. But in Obamanomics, businesses should hire people so they will have a job.

So this is why taxpayers have to continue to fund PBS?

But wait, there’s more. Remember the first stimulus package? All that shovel ready stuff, rebuilding the nation’s roads and infrastructure. He sold it to the American people on the pretense that that’s what it was going to be used for. And they bought it. Now we know it was nothing more than a slush fund to give to state governments to support the public-sector union wages and pension plans. Knowing full well that that money would come back to the Democratic party in 2010 like it did.

Well guess what? Pretend all that infrastructure rebuilding never happened. Because in reality, it didn’t. That’s why President Obama will be hitting up the American people for more money to ostensibly do the same thing that he asked Americans to pay for a couple years ago. You know, back when unemployment was in the 6-7 percent range.

We also need to give more opportunities to all those construction workers out there who lost their jobs when the housing boom went bust. We could put them to work right now, by giving loans to private companies that want to repair our roads and our bridges and our airports, rebuilding our infrastructure. We have workers who need jobs and a country that needs rebuilding; an infrastructure bank would help us put them together.

The administration is counting on the short memory of the dumb masses and outlets like PBS to dutifully carry their water. Short of admitting they have it all wrong, they are left with no other choice.

Link: With Debt Deal Done, Obama Turns to Re-election Campaign  |  With debt deal done, Obama sees need now for new spending on bridges, roads, unemployment  |  Huffington: Nobody Believes Obama’s Top Priority Is Jobs; It’s Getting Re-Elected  |  I Will Not Rest

2012 Election, Economy, Politics

Interest Rate And The Debt

As an aside from the debate in Washington about whether or not to raise the debt ceiling, spend less, or balance the budget, there is something else just as ominous to the country and future generations that you should know about.

We all understand that borrowing money has a direct cost to it, the interest rate. Interest rates now are at all-time lows. No problem. When interest rates go back up, big problem.

This video demonstrates the effect of what higher interest rates will have on the economy and yet unborn Americans.

Short version, instead of owing over $1 trillion a year in interest payments now, we could be looking at $2.6 trillion per year by 2021. Or to put it another way, it amounts to more than half of what the government gets in taxes per year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdbqjiIiQLQ

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi and The White House call the GOP’s plan (remember, Democrats don’t have a plan) extreme. Who knew that balancing the budget, reducing spending and trimming the size of government to a sustainable level would be characterized as extreme?

2012 Election, Economy

Obama And Jobs

Offering no new ideas on job growth, President Obama states the obvious, “we still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do.” Only 18,000 jobs were created last month, and unemployment rose .1 percent to 9.2 percent.

And did you notice Obama’s sleight of hand on people in the construction industry who are out of work? He used them as potential workers to push his proposed spending on roads, bridges and infrastructure.

The transcript illustrates Obama’s support for public sector labor union jobs, to the exclusion of private sector jobs in general. And that those jobs were a result of budget cutting, aka reduced spending. Too bad for everyone else that represents the majority of working people. Those are the ones out of work, not because of budget cutting, but because of Obama’s economic strategy.

And over the past few months, the economy has experienced some tough headwinds — from natural disasters, to spikes in gas prices, to state and local budget cuts that have cost tens of thousands of cops and firefighters and teachers their jobs.

There are a few things that we can and should do, right now, to redouble our efforts on behalf of the American people. Let me give you some examples. Right now, there are over a million construction workers out of work after the housing boom went bust, just as a lot of America needs rebuilding. We connect the two by investing in rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our railways and our infrastructure. {emphasis added}

If creating jobs in the private sector construction industry was important to him, he might have instead tried to connect the devastation caused by natural disasters all over the country and the massive rebuilding that is required, with the people who can and would do it. In my fantasy I was hoping he would try something like that. Putting those contractors to work, and all the employees and families that they support, would be the kind of job creation that the economy is starving for.

But no. Rather than try to do that, and not trying to rally the American people and their entrepreneurial spirit, he chose to stick with government spending projects that produce very little towards economic recovery and job creation.

Undaunted by public opinion and the economic reality of the consequences of his policies, President Obama is hell-bent on more of the same. Doing nothing to eliminate the FUD factor (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) from business and investment decisions. So this is the record he expects to run on next year?

Link: Obama’s Rose Garden address July 8, 2011